Sutter Medical Center Bridge Built Off-Site to Be Moved, Installed This Weekend

SACRAMENTO — It sounds like the beginning of a joke, but it’s not: A pedestrian bridge will be crawling up J Street early Saturday morning.

The 80-foot-long bridge will be making its way to its final destination at the corner of 29th and L streets and will link the new Anderson Lucchetti Women’s and Children Center to parking lot for visitors and physicians– one of a series of spans that will connect all of Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento’s comprehensive services on one midtown campus.

The open-air, covered bridge, which was designed by Lionakis, was built off-site in order to minimize traffic interruptions at Sutter Medical Center’s midtown campus, which includes the construction of the Women’s and Children’s Center and a major renovation of Sutter General Hospital. The plan to construct the bridge at another location allowed 29th Street to be closed only on weekends.

The bridge was built at Viking Steel on Elder Creek Road and will be loaded onto a truck and brought up Interstate 5 to J Street. From there, it will turn right onto 29th Street to the corner of L Street. Transporting the bridge will begin at 4 a.m. Saturday and will take up to two hours.

29th Street will be closed beginning at 7 p.m. Friday until 5 a.m. Monday to allow crews to attach the bridge to both sides. Once the span is on the site, a crane will lift the 66,000-pound bridge into place and workers will work on Saturday and Sunday to ensure that it is properly secured.

When fully completed this summer, the bridge on the parking lot side will include an elevator and stairs designed to look like a treehouse, Lionakis officials said.

“The bridge design is intended as a metaphor to reference the iconic Sacramento tree canopy that engulfs many of the streets throughout the city,” said Mike Davey, an associate with Lionakis. “The ‘treehouse’ that contains the elevator and stairs is designed to provide a playful relief for the patients and caregivers of the medical facility, especially the children.”

When the expanded Sutter Medical Center, Sacramento campus opens in 2014, there will be six spans connecting all of Sutter Medical Center’s services under one roof. Besides the 29th Street bridge, the spans are:

The three-story spanning structure over L Street that will seamlessly connect the Women’s and Children’s Center and Sutter General Hospital, which will be renamed the Ose Adams Medical Pavilion.

A bridge over 28th Street that connects the Sutter Cancer Center with Sutter Capitol Pavilion, a specialty physicians medical office building and outpatient services center that opened in 2010. This bridge completed construction just this week.

A bridge connecting the Sutter Cancer Center, which will be renamed the Buhler Specialty Pavilion, and the Women’s and Children’s Center.

The existing bridges that connect the Sutter Cancer Center and Sutter General Hospital, and the other that links Sutter General to the Fort Sutter medical office building.